Daily Mail - 06.09.2019

Daily Mail, Friday, September 6, 2019 Page 27
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Shrouded in

secrecy, but

Handmaid’s

sequel is no

masterpiece

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

(Chatto & Windus £20, 432pp)

★★★✩✩

Anthony

Cummins

Review by

In UK stores

for first time,

smart pods

that can cut

plastic blight

A SOLUTION to the problem of

plastic bottles that clutter

kitchen and bathroom cup-

boards may have been found.

‘Pods’ that carry concentrated

household cleaning fluids are

going on sale in UK supermar-

kets for the first time.

The pods are put into a stand-

ard ‘bottle for life’, which can

be repeatedly re-used, doing

away with the need to buy a

new plastic bottle each time.

The capsules have a coating

similar to that used for liquid

laundry and dishwashers tabs,

which dissolves when water is

added to the re-usable bottle.

The system and pods have

been developed by a company

called OceanSaver, and the

supermarket Morrisons helped

bring the product to market.

Individual pods cost £1.50 or

By Sean Poulter

Consumer Affairs Editor

Connery’s lucky escape as Dorian kills 20 in Bahamas

Safe: Actor lives on New Providence

SIR Sean Connery says he is ‘lucky’ to

have escaped Hurricane Dorian

unharmed after it wreaked destruction

in the Bahamas.

The Bond star lives on the island of New

Providence, which was largely spared by the

storm, with his wife Micheline.

But at least 20 people were killed in the

category five hurricane, which battered the

islands with gusts of up to 225mph. The

death toll is expected to rise as the clean-up

operation continues.

‘We are both fine,’ the 89-year-old actor

told the Scottish Daily Mail. ‘We were lucky

compared to many others and the damage

here was not great. We had been prepared

for the storm, everything was ready in

advance – we weren’t taking any chances

and knew what to do.’

Sir Sean has lived in the Bahamas since

the 1990s, and owns a mansion in Lyford

Cay, an exclusive gated community on New

Providence, around 90 miles from Great

Abaco, which was worst hit by the storm.

Among the survivors is a British woman

who was rescued after spending days

trapped under the rubble of a collapsed

building on Great Abaco.

She was saved by a crew from RFA Mounts

Bay, an auxiliary ship staffed by civilians and

members of the Royal Navy, deployed to the

islands to help with the rescue effort.

After being treated by Royal Navy medics

the unnamed woman was airlifted to hospi-

tal in the Bahamian capital of Nassau.

The rescue team, aboard a Royal Navy

Wildcat helicopter, also saved an American

mother and her three children, including a

seven-week old baby.

Five days after Hurricane Dorian hit, at

least 135 people have been pulled alive from

the wreckage. But the storm has left 60,000

people without food and clean water.

Last night British Foreign Secretary

Dominic Raab said the Government had set

aside £1.5million in assistance.

By Emily Kent Smith and Bill Caven

Atlantic should be this year’s

Booker judges, who have some-

how let themselves believe The

Testaments is one of 2019’s six

best novels.

Atwood’s original 1985 novel was

a taut, chilling satire imagining

the imprisonment of American

women in a near-future New

England theocracy known as

Gilead, where they serve as

concubines and surrogate moth-

ers – Handmaids – or, if they’re

infertile, in other roles, including

Aunts, deployed as the regime’s

sinister eyes and ears.

The book left it moot whether its

narrator, a Handmaid called

Offred, ruthlessly separated from

her young daughter, manages to

escape. Surprisingly, Atwood’s

baggier, arguably more ambitious,

sequel doesn’t pick up Offred’s

story, instead focusing on three

new narrators whose tales fill

in a few of the blanks left by

the original novel about the rise –

and fall – of Gilead’s uber-

patriarchal republic.

Agnes is a well-to-do Command-

er’s daughter on the cusp of

puberty, an arranged marriage

looming. Daisy lives in Canada,

defying the wishes of her

mysteriously anxious parents to

attend an anti-Gilead protest

march in Toronto.

Then there’s Lydia, Gilead’s

highest-ranking Aunt, scheming

to bring down the regime from

inside in a plot that will unite

jolts of drip-fed detail as Offred’s

shut-in existence comes alarm-

ingly into view. In The Testaments,

Atwood’s world-building relies

instead on plodding tranches of

question-and-answer sessions

crowbarred into the dialogue to

supply vital information. ‘By now

you maybe wondering how I’ve

avoided being purged by those

higher up,’ says Lydia at one point,

as Atwood gets bogged down in

pitfalls of her own making.

Instead of slow-burn psycho-

drama, we get turbo-charged

derring-do: This is the sort of book

in which people yell ‘We need to

hurry’ and ‘We made it!’

Shades of grey become black and

white: Judd, the central Com-

mander character here, unlike his

more ambiguous counterpart in

The Handmaid’s Tale, is a straight-

up super-baddie – you can all but

hear Atwood cackling in the wings

when he gleefully announces his

latest counter-strike on the cross-

border anti-Gilead militants out

to topple the regime.

As Aunt Lydia slyly masterminds

the takedown of a system she once

had no choice but to abet, the

storyline seems intended to land

as a feelgood revenge narrative

but Atwood’s plot mechanics,

involving a patiently compiled

dossier of atrocities committed in

Gilead, end up hard to credit.

Feminist dystopia has been

literary fiction’s genre du jour for

a while now.

If you can hardly begrudge

Atwood for jumping on a band-

wagon she herself set rolling, it’s

equally difficult not to feel that

she’s basically writing her own fan

fiction here.

Trouble is, The Testaments isn’t

a patch on the original, and no

matter how seductive the public-

ity razzmatazz, the Booker judges

• one of whom, Liz Calder, used to
  be Atwood’s editor – ought to
  know better than to propose this
  serviceable action romp as some
  kind of timeless masterpiece.
  The Testaments is published on
  Tuesday. The Booker Prize winner
  will be announced on October 14.
  Friday Books – Pages 52-55

THE breathless anticipation around

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s

sequel to her dystopian classic The

Handmaid’s Tale, has been fuelled by

its shortlisting for the Booker Prize.

But the promotional hoopla was deflated

this week when Amazon drove a 20-ton

truck through the book’s media embargo by

shipping copies from its warehouse ahead of

time to readers in the US.

The people feeling sheepish on this side of the

Shut-in existence: Elisabeth Moss as Offred in the

television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale

can be bought with a recycla-

ble bottle for life for £2.50.

Morrisons will be the first

supermarket to sell the pods in

a trial at seven stores.

It says the product contains

99 per cent less water, which

makes up most of the weight of

other cleaning products, mean-

ing fewer trucks on the road

and fewer carbon emissions.

Madeleine Jackson, cleaning

buyer at Morrisons, said: ‘We

believe we’re the first super-

market to sell a variety of

cleaning pods for different jobs

around the home. They will

help our customers to reduce

single use plastic in their clean-

ing cupboard.’

The move is part of a wider

effort by supermarkets to cut

back on plastic packaging.

Morrisons already encour-

ages people to bring their own

containers for deli counter

items. Waitrose is expanding a

trial that allows shoppers to

use their own containers and

Marks & Spencer offers a 25p

discount for shoppers who

bring their own receptacles.

CAMPAIGN

PLASTIC

TURN THE

TIDE ON

d s e y d n y f e

S

t

Not a patch on

the original

Agnes and Daisy by revealing to

them their hidden origins.

Thanks in part to the television

serial it inspired, shown here on

Channel 4, The Handmaid’s Tale

continues to attract new readers.

And it still stands up more than

30 years on – not just because it

remains topical in an era of

renewed US Senate debate over

women’s reproductive rights but

because of the lean allure of the

storytelling, which runs on electric